


bonnie and clyde

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: TWICE (Band), 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Character Study, Dark Comedy, Drunkenness, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Introspection, References to Depression, Regret, implied eating disorders, industry meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-02 02:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17879720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: A word of advice: don’t get blackout drunk with the person you hate more than anyone else in the world, because you might wake up in a motel in the middle of fuck-knows-where USA.





	bonnie and clyde

**Author's Note:**

> Or "that time I wrote a fic based on like three fancams."

She wakes up with a throbbing headache splitting a crack down the middle of her head and the soft orange light of dawn shining in a thin line through the curtains. She’s somewhere—no idea where, but somewhere, and it should bother her more than it does that she doesn't know. She blinks, trying to orient herself to these dark curtains she doesn’t recognize, and her eyes rove from the curtains to the dark sea of carpet, her crumpled white dress a lump in the middle. Fuck, her head hurts. Her tongue is dry in her mouth. Maybe she won’t get up when her manager comes in—beg instead for a day of rest while everyone else goes out sightseeing. She turns her head, expecting to see Momo in the next bed, and—

 

“What the _fuck?_ ” she cries, launching herself up off the bed.

 

The naked male body stirs and mutters something like _just five more minutes_ under his breath, and—she takes deep breaths, is this what an anxiety attack feels like?—she doesn’t like the way that blonde hair is curling at the nape of his neck.

 

“Shit, shit, shit,” she hisses under her breath, snatching her dress off of the floor and yanking it over her head. She’s never done this before, woken up to a maybe-stranger in a strange bed, and her heart is pounding hard. Her dress is still twisted the wrong way under her arms as she pulls on her flats and fumbles with the chain lock on the door, then throws it open, and—

 

Outside is a mostly-empty parking lot, and beyond that, an endless expanse of dry desert wasteland under a deep blue sky.

 

“What the _fuck!”_ she yells again.

 

 

 

Jeongyeon is a very calm person. She doesn’t get ruffled by the stresses of her career—she’s the one holding back her bandmates’ hair when they’re throwing up their guts to get down to the sample size in time for a red carpet, or telling off the security guard who thought he’d get away with brushing his hand over the edge of her boob, or sneaking out after hours just to savor a few minutes’ respite from the onslaught of fame. She takes it all as it comes, accepts it and responds to it. No worries.

 

But Jeongyeon is not calm now. She turns back around from the door, her mind a tornado of unanswerable questions, and forces herself to deal with the first problem in front of her. She screws her eyes up closed, then opens one for a look at the person on the bed.

 

It’s him.

 

He sits up and blinks around at the room. “Where _are_ we?” he asks, and Jeongyeon can’t decide if that’s really the most important question when _Why am I naked?_ is also an option.

 

“I don’t know,” she says, trying to look in his direction without looking at his naked body. “Can you cover yourself?”

 

The bit of his face she can see through her squinted line of vision turns to horror as he looks at himself. “Shit, why am I naked?”

 

There it is. Maybe he’s not quite as stupid as she thought.

 

She untwists her dress as he turns his back to her and pulls on his clothes. And then it’s just her and BTS’s Park Jimin, both of them wearing wrinkled, cigarette smoke-scented clothes in a crappy hotel room in the middle of fuck-knows-where-USA.

 

“Did we…” Jimin gestures to the bed with one hand, his other hand going to the back of his neck. He has the decency to flush a deep shade of pink.

 

“How am I supposed to know?” Jeongyeon snaps in return. “The last thing I remember is going to the hotel bar with my band members.” _And avoiding you there,_ she doesn’t add.

 

“Yeah, me too.” He sinks down onto the bed and grips his knees. She tries to push back through her murky memory for some clue as to how they ended up here—she remembers finishing the Los Angeles Music Bank recording and returning to the hotel, where she and all her band members received texts to meet in the hotel bar that night for a semi-approved industry party. She’d gone mostly because Momo didn’t want to go alone, and neither of them could leave Nayeon alone to make dumb choices, and they all liked to watch Sana work a room. She was almost sociopathic with her charm. Same sociopathic charm was how Jeongyeon ended up throwing back way too many shots, and saying at some point _there is no one I hate more in this room than Park Jimin,_ and—well, after that, her memory gets a little bit fuzzy.

 

“Maybe,” Jeongyeon says, wincing a little at the thought, “Our bands are in the next room over.” Maybe they’d locked her and Jimin in this hotel room to see whether they would have sex or kill each other. Disgusting experiment, but as good of an explanation as she can come up with.

 

Jimin brightens a little and stands up. “Yeah. I bet this is all a big prank.”

 

“A _stupid_ prank,” Jeongyeon says.

 

“Yeah,” he agrees, brushing past her to open the door. Heat from the outside rolls in like a tall wave. “Stupid, but ha ha, the joke’s over now. We can get something to eat and sleep this hangover off.”

 

She follows him out the door and into the parking lot, where they stand under the hot sun and survey the line of motel rooms. It’s one strip in front of them, and another at a ninety-degree angle to their right, with identical windows all showing their reflection.

 

Two lost Kpop idols, blue sky, brown desert expanse. The worst part of it is the silence.

 

It’s pretty clear to her that their band members aren’t waiting in the next room to see the punchline of the joke. It’s pretty clear to her that that was just wishful thinking—and anyway, her band members wouldn’t _do_ something that cruel. Wherever they are, it’s just the two of them here alone. She looks over at Jimin and sees from the thin line of his mouth that he must have already reached the same conclusion.

 

Jimin points to the building on their right. “Let’s go over there,” he says.

 

“Why?”

 

“It’s the office, and we can figure out where we are.”

 

“How would you know?”

 

“Because it says ‘office’ right there.”

 

Jeongyeon can see that, but she rolls her eyes anyway. “Just because you’re doing all these promotions in America doesn’t mean you need to rub it in other people’s faces.”

 

“I’m not rubbing it in your face! I’m looking for a solution!”

 

“Why didn’t you look for a solution _earlier?_ ”

 

Jimin rolls his eyes and stalks in the direction of the office. Jeongyeon watches him for a second, swallowing down the bile of hatred threatening to spew itself all over him in the form of a few choice statements. Instead, she runs after him.

 

The office is a small room just as dingy as the rest of the establishment, and stuffy in spite of the air conditioner rattling overhead. A white lady with dyed-red hair sits smoking a cigarette and watching something that looks like _The Masked Singer_ on an old television set _._ She looks up at them as they enter, her drawn-on eyebrows lifting high on her wrinkled forehead.

 

She says something. Jimin doesn’t say anything, just smiles. Jeongyeon smiles, too, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

 

“What did she say?” she asks.

 

Jimin looks back at her and shrugs. “I don’t know.”

 

“I thought you spoke English.”

 

“I just speak enough English to talk to Jimmy Fallon! What do you want from me?”

 

She rolls her eyes and reminds herself that murder is a crime in every country. Better to take care of this herself—she drudges up all the English she can remember from her school tests and smiles at the lady. “Where are we?” she asks.

 

The lady says something. Jeongyeon blinks. Jimin gives her a snarky, jerkish smile in return.

 

The lady pulls out a map, slaps it on the countertop, and points with her long, plastic nail.

 

Jeongyeon doesn’t know what the hell the map says, but she does know that they aren’t anywhere near Los Angeles. She has a vague memory though, something like a dream, of standing at a bus stop and laughing hysterically, leaning into someone who was, apparently, Jimin.

 

“Fuck!” she says, in English. The lady laughs at her—not unkindly, but she clearly thinks Jeongyeon and Jimin are some kind of runaway lovers based on how she keeps looking between them, and Jeongyeon really wants to throw up for reasons not completely related to her headache. “How did we even get here?” she asks Jimin, keeping one eye on the lady’s fingernail on the map.

 

He asks the lady, and the lady laughs and says something, but the only thing Jeongyeon catches is “bus.” She wishes it had really been a dream. Then Jimin says something else, and the lady shuffles out from behind the desk, puts her hand on Jimin’s shoulder, and leads them both outside. They cross the parking lot, and out by the road, she points at a sign which reads BUS SCHEDULE: LOS ANGELES - LAS VEGAS.

 

“This only comes once a _day_?” Jimin cries out. But the lady is already heading back to the office, laughing her head off.

 

 

 

They return to the hotel room and search every nook and cranny for any possessions they might have hidden or dropped in their drunken stupor. Jeongyeon finds her phone between the sheets, but its battery is dead. She goes to the office to ask about a charging cord, but the lady has nothing, and gives her a couple of condoms instead. Jeongyeon throws them away in a metal trash can outside the motel room door.

 

“I hate him,” she announces to the trash can, and kicks it. It burns her bare toe.

 

“Okay,” Jimin says when she re-enters the room, blinking to adjust back to the dim light. “I found twenty US dollars, a receipt for our bus tickets which I can’t totally read, and this!” He holds up a piece of paper. “It’s the wifi password!”

 

“This place has wifi?” Jeongyeon asks, looking around. The hotel room, now that she’s awake and sober, is clearly a dump. The kind of place for seedy hookups—and, okay, Jeongyeon is apparently the kind of person who has seedy hookups. With her fellow Kpop stars. Great. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. My phone is dead.”

 

“Oh.” Jimin’s face falls. “Well—we can just use the regular phone—”

 

“Do _you_ know anyone’s number?”

 

“We could get online to check—”

 

“With what? I didn’t see anything that looks like a computer in that office.”

 

“Or we could call the police—”

 

“And let _everyone_ know you and I got black-out drunk and hooked up in the middle of hellhole USA? How do you think either of our companies is going to explain that one?”

 

“At least I’m _trying_ to think of ideas—”

 

“It doesn’t do any good if your ideas are _stupid—_ ”

 

“Why do you hate me so much?”

 

Jimin’s last question comes out as a veritable explosion, and Jeongyeon falls silent. He’s red in the face, his designer shirt hanging loosely askance on one shoulder, his dry blonde hair falling into his picture-perfect eyes. She focuses on the sheen of sweat below his collarbone, runs her tongue over her teeth, and sucks in a deep breath.

 

“Think about it,” she says, her eyes flicking up to meet his. Then she spins on her heels and stomps out of the room, slamming the door on her way out.

  


 

 

He should think about it. Jeongyeon, on the other hand, isn’t going to.

 

She stomps along the hot asphalt and over to the fenced-in pool on the third side of the lot. The gate is locked with a rusty chain, but she climbs over the fence and drops back down onto sand-colored concrete. It feels like she’s dropped out of her world and into another one—the air seems more still, the heat more oppressive. Dead leaves float in the dark pool water, moving as if by their own volition. She can’t feel any breeze to push them along, but they are still moving, spinning slowly across the surface.

 

She takes off her shoes and sits on the edge so she can dangle her feet in the warm water. Like this, she can almost convince herself that the blood pumping in her chest is only a side effect of the heat, and the headache splitting down her forehead is just the hangover. She’s spent a lot of time insisting that she doesn’t have any emotion driving her hatred for Jimin other than anger—righteous anger, for what it’s worth—because admitting otherwise would be admitting she’d once hoped for something else from him. And Jeongyeon, present or past, isn’t that stupid.

 

 _He’s a jerk_ , Nayeon had agreed with her back then, and Mina had called him a “fuck boy,” some term learned from Bambam or—actually, Jeongyeon purposely didn’t ask where she learned it. The only important thing was that they listened to her tirades, fed her anger, laughed along with her when he avoided her on stage and pretended to be the world’s most innocent superstar. As if anyone gets to be that famous without compromising his moral compass.

 

(And no, Jeongyeon isn’t asking the same question about herself, thanks very much.)

 

Once Brian asked her _what’s your beef with him?_ And he listened patiently while she explained it, then said _are you sure you really hate him, or are you just hoping you can rewrite history by pretending you do?_ That put a pretty significant damper on her friendship with Brian for a while, too. Truth be told, she’s still kind of pissed that he said it, looking at her like he could see right through her and into her calloused, prickly heart.

 

If she lets herself look back, after all, she doesn’t like what she finds. Fresh and naive Jeongyeon flirting backstage. Stupid and guileless Jeongyeon thinking she could have fun and be famous at the same time. It all culminated at an idol house party, the two of them in an unused guest room. She remembers every detail down to the mismatched whites of the curtains and the bedspread, and—this is the part she’s been trying to forget—how she’d been the one to pull him back into the bed, spread her legs and revel in the conquest. When you’re one of nine, anything you can call your own feels like a victory. Even if you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

 

She never told anyone the truth. Try hard enough and you can rewrite your memories into the shape you want them to be. Live as the person you pretend to be on screen. Try hard enough and you don’t have to feel anything at all.

  


 

 

She stays out at the pool, baking in the sun, for a long time. Long enough for her skin to become tender to the touch, but she doesn’t bother moving. Just lies there listening to the sound of cars revving down the street, and the wide spaces of silence that follow.

 

The gate rattles and she looks up to see Jimin landing on her side of the fence. He walks toward her with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking awkward, maybe a little bit ashamed. Probably an act—she doubts he has the emotional capacity for shame.

 

“I found my credit card,” he says, sitting himself down beside her. She props herself up on her elbows and watches as he takes off his shoes and rolls up his jeans. “I guess that’s how we got the bus ticket. And the room.”

 

She makes an _mm_ sound and looks at the leaves in the water, stirred back into motion as Jimin drops his feet into the pool. Truth be told she shouldn’t feel anything, doesn’t want to feel anything—she never expected any kind of relationship with him, and she’s a modern woman who should be able to enjoy herself without getting tripped up by her emotions. But it was just—so _easy_ for him, it seemed. To forget.

 

“If my manager is smart,” he continues, “He’ll find a way to look into my purchase history, and they’ll come find us.”

 

“Is your manager smart?”

 

“I guess we’re going to find out.”

 

He plays with the fraying fabric around the holes in his jeans, frowning out at the desert stretching beyond the motel. In truth she doesn’t know that much about him, not really, and the quiet intimacy of the moment feels dangerous. She sucks in a deep breath and holds it, then exhales slowly, aware of the three inches of space between their legs.

 

“You know,” he says without looking at her. “I don’t know if you feel this way, but sometimes I feel like everything happens so fast I never have any time to think.”

 

She doesn’t answer, because she can’t bring herself to agree with him too readily. But—she’d flown from Korea to Japan to the US without a break. The only way she can beat her insomnia is to get blackout drunk. And she’s not even unhappy about it, not really. She just feels numb.

 

“We were recording this talk show a couple of weeks ago,” he says. “I was sitting there and I saw myself in the monitor and I just had this moment, like—who the hell am I? I couldn’t even recognize myself. I felt like the guy on the screen was somebody else.”

 

Her eyes flick to his face before she can stop herself. And maybe he’s just acting a part, but something in the thin hunch of his shoulders feels familiar. She wonders where the truth is, between the angle of his jaw and the calculated downward turn of his mouth. If, when the whirlwind stops, either of them are going to be able to recognize themselves.

 

“I’m sorry about how I acted—after we...” he says, glancing back at her with something dark in his eyes. “I just—I thought it would be easier if I didn’t—”

 

“Ever acknowledge me again?”

 

He shakes his head. “I just thought it would be easier.”

 

She chews at her lip and pushes her feet back and forth through the water. “Easier than what?”

 

He shrugs. “Easier than finding out what happens after. You only get one love in this line of work, you know.”

 

“And what’s that?” She already knows the answer, but she’s hoping it’s something else.

 

“The work,” he says, and smiles the way he does when he’s on camera, and wants a million hearts to break.

 

 

 

 

He leaves her alone at the pool, sitting there hugging her wet knees to her chest and trying not to think a hundred different thoughts at once.

 

How did she end up here? Lost in America, beside a crappy pool in day-old clothes, halfway to understanding the person she hates the most. It comes back to the alcohol, if she’s being honest with herself—she wanted an escape and she took the fastest available route. It’s not the first time she’s been drunk, but it’s the first time she ended up like this. Once in Japan they kicked the maknaes out and drank enough to call it “having fun,” and Jeongyeon doesn’t remember much but there was probably spin-the-bottle and definitely alcohol poisoning afterward. She’d sworn off the stuff that very day after puking in the bathroom backstage and then walking on for a three-hour concert like nothing was wrong. And yet here she is. Maybe it’s a drinking problem, but when you live in a fishbowl, your options for escape are few.

 

And anyway. By tomorrow they’ll be found, returned to their careers, and it will be as if none of this ever happened at all.

 

 

 

 

She goes back to the motel room, her dress damp from the pool. The air conditioner isn’t working, or Jimin turned it off, and he’s lying shirtless on the bed while the ceiling fan turns slowly overhead. He sees her, and moves to sit up and pull on his shirt.

 

“Don’t bother,” she tells him, chewing at her lip. Considering herself in this moment. So much of her trouble comes from acting without thinking, but she really doesn’t want to think right now. She crosses the room and sits herself on the bed, facing him. His eyes follow her movement, resting heavily on her, dark and luminous. Her heart isn’t beating hard. It isn’t.

 

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think anything happened between us yesterday,” he says. “I think I was naked because it’s too damn hot.”

 

“Okay,” she says automatically.

 

He brushes his fingertips against her knee and all the blood in her body pools to that one spot.

 

“I know what it feels like not to have control in a situation,” he says, his eyes heavy and his fingers hot on her skin. “Even drunk, I wouldn’t take that from you.”

 

A beat. They hold each other’s gaze.

 

“I know,” she says, and this time she means it. He’s a lot of things, but he isn’t that.

 

He doesn’t move his hand and she’s counting up time by the pulsing rhythm of the veins in her knee.

 

“Truth or dare,” she says in a hoarse voice. It’s the only thing she can think to say.

 

But he smiles. “Truth.”

 

She casts around for something to diffuse the electricity building between them, something pointless and simple.

 

“Do you ever hook up with your fans when you’re abroad?” she asks, really wondering. The industry is rife with rumors. Dispatch doesn't hold a candle to what idols whisper behind each other's backs.

 

He laughs. “No.”

 

“Your bandmates?”

 

“That’s a second question,” he says, tapping his fingers against her thigh. Her skin burns at his touch. “You gotta wait till your next turn. Truth or dare?”

 

“Truth.”

 

He falls quiet. The trouble with men was the very same thing that attracts her—the mystery, the impossibility, like a deceptively simple puzzle never quite cracked. She hates the way he’s looking at her, like maybe he’ll turn out to be the very thing she wanted all along. Or maybe something else all together. Right now, with a low pull in her stomach and her heart in her throat, she’s not really sure she cares.

 

“Do you really hate me?” he asks.

 

She tells herself to get up, walk away, get away from this. The future isn’t written yet, and the past doesn’t exist, and the magnetic pull of his palm against her thigh can be broken with just a little bit of resolve.

 

“Yes,” she says, her voice hoarse. She doesn’t get up. “Truth or dare.”

 

He hesitates, waiting to see what she really meant—but hell, she doesn’t even know. She hates him and she wants him to touch her somewhere besides her thigh.

 

“Dare.”

 

“Hey!” she cries, playing with the joke while something else thrums low beneath it, the bass line of bad ideas.

 

“You gave me an option,” he laughs.

 

“Fine,” she says, screwing up her nose.

 

 _Don’t do it,_ says her brain.

 

Her mouth says, “Kiss me.”

 

It’s a stupid thing to say. Stupider when her mind goes haywire as he sits up and moves into a kiss without interlude. They lean into each other, his hands moving under her dress and her tongue sliding across his. The sunset glows through the blinds, casting his face in an orange glow. She pushes him back down into the bed.

 

It’s stupid. But— _fuck_ —stupid feels good. And no one has to know.

 

 

 

 

Their managers arrive after dark in a tiny rental car. The headlights shining through the blinds of the room give the warning signal, and Jeongyeon scrambles to pull her dress back on before her manager starts shouting her name and pounding a fist against the door.

 

They walk out of the room with their shoulders squared, as though nothing happened—they’re idols, after all, and if they can’t fake it, who can? She holds her head high and ignores the aftershocks in her body. What has happened now hardly changes what happened before, but she feels like she's won a battle. Taken something back. This time, he'll be the one left wanting, and she'll be the one winning the war. 

 

Jimin looks at her, once, offering her the smallest smile in the harsh beam of the car’s headlights. As they pull away, she catches a glimpse of the white lady smoking a cigarette outside the office door. She raises the hand with the cigarette in the air, its tiny orange ember the last thing Jeongyeon sees of the hotel as they drive away and into the night.

 

 

 

 

It’s so easy to forget.

 

After a few months, Jeongyeon can almost convince herself that nothing happened. Her band members, ashamed that they were too drunk to notice when she disappeared, don’t bring up “the incident” except once when the makeup artist asks about it and they shush her, repeating _nothing happened_ with a ferocity Jeongyeon admires.

 

She stops gossiping about him at awards shows. Makes sure her expressions don’t give away her thoughts. Even bows to him, directly and without reservation, when they pass by each other on a red carpet. His eyes follow her, asking a question she can’t answer. She looks over her shoulder and catches his gaze, just long enough to make sure he's thinking about just how much they can do without getting caught.

 

“Do you still hate him?” Nayeon whispers in her ear, nodding toward Jimin’s back. A thousand cameras flash and the air reverberates with screams. Jimin smiles like he’s keeping a secret that’s threatening to spill from between his lips.

 

And if she pulls him into a dark corner backstage to pull that secret out herself—well, who will know? Only the two of them.

 

“Yes,” Jeongyeon whispers back. “Yes, I still hate him.”

 

 

 

end.


End file.
